Because the "moderates" view the actual content of the bible as not important.
Just like postmodernists view the actual relation between science and reality as subject to change, and irrelevant. Needless to say, science is supposed to be an approximate model of reality, getting closer to reality all the time. It is most certainly not independant of reality.
Both positions are disastrously misguided. In reality both groups are the same, the "moderates" will betray their religion the first time it seems like a good idea and postmodernists enact policies they can perfectly well predict will backfire. They have no ideology at all. Right now their "ideas of the second" seem invincible, but you just wait 5 years and they'll be forgotten. The global warming craze, was ironically preceede by a global cooling craze and will make way for the next idiocy once unmasked for the idiocy that it is. Just like the latest pushes for extreme accomodation of enemies will give way once they get blown up. They are mere fashions, posing as science or religion, nothing more.
E.g. Obama's national healthcare. Exactly how many times must this be implemented and disastrously go wrong before we learn ? A basic respect of science would make them at least explain, honestly, exactly how their scheme differs from that in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and the many European states where it's collapsing. But they don't even attempt to show the difference.
Another example. The IPCC was founded on the prediction that 2008 would be the warmest year on record. In reality it's was close to the coldest year on record. A real scientist would go back to the drawing board, figure out what went wrong (because we don't even know why 2008 and the years before it were so cold, we haven't got a clue. Perhaps the solar cycle had something to do with 2008, but that leaves 2006 and 2007 unexplained... apparently "something" caused an ocean oscillation is the current theory. Well I sure hope that this unknown "something" factor that apparently regularly causes sea changes in global temperatures are modeled correctly. How do you model large unknowns ? You don't). Before that, they declared la nina, a wind of south america, for their previous disastrous misprediction.
The fact that you don't immediately see what is wrong with that sentence is indicative of just how wrong current opinion on the subject is : if models don't match reality, the blame rests, not on reality such as winds or ocean oscillations, but with the scientists makin gthe prediction
The only change is doing it in public. But seriously, this government is going to send a $300.000 bill to every newborn American already, isn't it getting "a bit" ridiculous ?
At what point do you impeach a president ? When he spends $1 million of your money ? In other words, next month ?
So many mistakes... so little space to illustrate them
(On a side note, if you take the Bible to be completely without error, this means that any discrepancy whatsoever topples it totally;
If you were a 100% perfect human, yes. However the bible clearly states that any human is merely a little fallible being, much less reliable than the text of the bible (which seems to me an evident truth, even if the bible were not to be all that accurate, beating human's reliability isn't hard at all).
One example of this is the values of pi that can be found in the bible. You can find different values for that constant. Of course, upon closer inspection this turns out to be untrue : pi is said to be "about 3", and yet it is said "you should relate a circumference to it's radius like 22/7" (which is a very good and simple to use approximation. I know architects used it right up to 2001 : it calculates heavenly, yet is accurate enough for quite large structures).
Clearly things like that have bearing on the correct way to read the bible.
how do you justify the discrepancies between the accounts of Judas's death in Matthew 27:3-10 and Acts 1:18?
So, obviously, the answer is that further study is required, as the flaw is obviously in our reading comprehension and not in the bible. Just like the contradictions in science (e.g. we know the universe to be bigger than 26 billion light years and no older than 13 billion light years. So either faster-than-light travel is possible (and quite likely, if a few billion galaxies have done it), or the big bang theory is wrong. But that's just one, there are many others. Contradictions are how science advances. Contradictions are how theology advances).
Apparent contradictions demand further study, not a rejection of everything we know. After all, we know that the theory of natural numbers has a contradiction related to infinite collections (does the collection of all collections that don't containt themselves contained in itself ? The answer is both yes and no). All theory in exact sciences is utterly dependent on the theory of natural numbers (since rational and real numbers are constructed out of this collection).
So if you were to reject everything that contained a contradiction, rather than realizing it's imperfection, you would in fact have to drop all of science.
You see, to a believer, contradictions in the bible are like scientific contradictions. There is no shortage of either. They are further similar, they merely mean that there are (hopefully small) imperfections in both our understanding of the bible and our understanding of the universe, even in our understanding of basic mathematics there are known contradictions.
We know Newton to be "wrong". Yet everything we do, putting down buildings and structures, is in fact done disregarding the differences between Newton and Einstein. Therefore you should conclude that our past understanding does not lose it's applicability to everyday problems just because it's shown to be slightly inaccurate. Just like one apparent problem in reading the bible does not mean everything is inaccurate.
One can be strong like steel, which is able to flex and give and thus remain intact, or strong like carbon fiber, which despite its greater nominal strength cracks or shatters when forced to move; "religious moderates" are those who take the former path, and whose core beliefs are thus able to survive and persist in a changing world).
This is the absurdity of the "lucas argument". It is utterly dependant on the consistency of human thought.
A consistency that is non-existent. Just look at the democrats who blame bush for "the biggest deficit in history". Say, how much did Obama spend in his first single month, again ? Of course, THAT spending has nothing to do with our debt.
But that's just one example many people are frustrated about. Unfortunately it can be trivially shown t
See, this is exactly what I mean. "NOOO the nazis (national socialists) were right-wing. They are the republicans. And we just can't discuss it".
The fact is that the nazis were more "modern" socialists than the soviets. They did not have faith in the automatic nature of the socialist revolution and needed to cause it themselves.
There are many, many uncomfortable truths about socialists. They were racist for the largest part of the 20th century. The KKK was, for over 50 years, a department of the democratic party, which was nearly exclusively a defender of, shall we say, the "southern way of life". A salient detail : Al Gore was secretary of his father, when his father was fighting to repeal the equality of black people.
And of course lefty propaganda is totally free of scaremongering and propaganda. Say... what's this whole "anti-racism" thing, and this "global warming" stuff, that just doesn't exist right ?
(oh right, like socialist eugenics before them, those are "scientific"* facts**)
* or whatever word makes it sound more serious. Liberals don't care about the contents of words, just the effect they have. Scientific, for example, would imply that there's a model of global warming that made predictions that ACTUALLY HAPPENED. As opposed to the totally unforeseen massive cold streak that's been with us for 3 years and counting, which would invalidate all those models if the rules of real science were followed and send all the alarmists back to the drawing board.
Scientific would imply that, if someone from the GOP said it.
** the real uncomfortable truth is that socialist eugenics were based on actual scientific studies, the sad truth is that according just about any scientific study blacks and whites are, in fact, different. White people are weaker and slower, white women cannot, on average, match the number of children a black woman can give birth to, and, unfortunately, black people are, again on average, dumber, just like whites are dumber than yellow people. This are statistical truths. They do not mean that every white is weaker than every black, nor that every black is dumber than every white. These are just a few examples, there are so many differences. AIDS immunity, for example, is a few thousand times more prevalent in blacks than in whites (some 10-15% of blacks are immune). In case anyone hadn't noticed yet, blacks have bigger lips and a more pronounced mouth.
There are other "rules" about muslims : such as the fact that they cannot live anywhere except in the caliph's nation.
They are to emigrate immediately. Seen any muslim do so lately ?
So let's stop the "oh no here's a tiny inpractical detail" bullshit. 9/11, constant attacks everywhere just didn't happen in the liberal mind. They mean nothing.
Except of course, if you were in the towers, or on the subway, or on the bus, or just minding your own business in the many places where muslims are massacring.
ur question uncomfortable in the least -- as modern interpretations of Islam (as opposed to those promoted by extremists) do not lead to a fully integrated war effort, and indeed, we do not see such efforts in practice . If the civilian population of Iraq were fully aligned against us, for instance, there would
No, there are merely extermination squads and such more. I mean you can deny stuff, "no agression in sight", like a total baboon all you want, but no Egyptian copt will believe you. No Jordanian Jew will believe you, not a single Christian Somali will agree with you.
In fact not even sufi's in Algeria, who share 99% of their ideology with "mainstram" islam (you call this "those promoted by extremists"), will believe that there isn't an integrated war effort to exterminate them.
Your "tolerance and compassion" has a long history, and is aptly described by this poem. And yet you pretend it is *so* much nobler than that, and don't talk about how the actions inspired by your "liberalism" are *exactly* the same as those cowardice would inspire. That, of course, is a mere coincidence that cannot be discussed.
Btw, I wonder. The prophet muhammad killed over 12000 people. Some because they were Jews, some because they were "infidels", some because they had stuff he wanted to steal. He also fucked a 9 year old girl against her will (she was sold to him in trade for a position in his army). These are the things muslims believe, including of course the motivations of this massacring prophet, and as they are written down very clearly for hundreds of years, are not open for discussion.
Tell me, would such behavior be considered extremist by you ? And then ask yourself the simple question : is the behavior of this guy... what exactly is the core of islam ? How is a muslim supposed to behave according to islam ?
How do you define "moderate" islam ? I wonder since requiring any measure of moderation would exclude the very core of the islamic ideology as an extremist nutbag.
Would you require a moderate muslim not to kill in the name of religion ? That would exclude mohamed. Would you require a moderate muslim not to commit paedophilic rape ? That would exclude mohamed. Would you require a moderate muslim not to steal or fight "in the name of allah" ? That would exclude mohamed.
How exactly will you explain this to muslims (until quite recently known as mohameddans) ?
The liberal mind and the fight for the bubble isolating them from reality.
Btw : how do you defend yourself being "liberal", a word which means freedom ? After all you're defending a totalitarian ideology that's killing off dissenters. You really can't get any more illiberal than that.
On the other hand, were it done right it would make for a very interesting game (the grey area I mean, the torture bit wouldn't add anything). However I'm afraid it would be extremely difficult to pull off successfully. Few films managed it and with games where the player has to feel at least a degree of freedom it would probably be even more difficult.
This assumes, of course, that once Germany turned into the street of "national socialism" and started the associated programs (national health care, free universities, massive unemployment and retirement benefit packages) that they had any real choice left...
It could be interesting to start a player out at the head of such a government, and said player has to balance the different aspects. Ie. said player would have to avoid getting lynched because the government fails to hold up the benefit packages and a player has to choose for himself whether to enact various nazi policies, and has to contend with the stifling and debilitating effect government control has on companies and production. And has to content with all sorts of effects. E.g. free press -> exposure to soviet and american propaganda -> regular lefty terrorist actions and american propaganda turning people against the fascist ideology.
You could make it really fun. Start it in 2008 century and call it "B.O."
We would not have been required to fight in a manner to preserve Japanese civilians in such a ground war. (The complete social integration of the Jap war effort argues that distinction between civilian and uniformed fighter was pointless anyway.)
You mean that, given a totalitarian ideology exists in a certain country, that there is no real distinction between actual armed forces and "innocents" ?
As illustrated here this was true for both Nazi germany *and* "imperial" Japan ("imperial" being a name that disguises a religion, an ideology, and not a state)
Talk about an uncomfortable truth. And then the real shocker : "say, how does this apply to islam ?". Boy, I wouldn't want to expose a "liberal" mind to that one.
Which generates yet another uncomfortable question : what is the difference between those peoples (Europe in the mid-twentieth century and Japan) and today's middle east ?
Or : if you want a people to peacefully rebuild, what is the influence of showing that you're willing and able to exterminate them if they don't (with firebombing random civilians / nuking a city). Was that really a negative influence ?
Realist thinking leads to very uncomfortable questions indeed. It promotes the danger of seeing that the nazis did not start out exterminating people, but started with the idea of equalizing german society. It makes people dangerously prone of seeing the connections that are evident, connections that we are deeply uncomfortable with, like socialism + darwinism -> healthcare cost mounting + "the weak will perish anyway" -> socialist "eugenics" -> isolating "the weak that will perish in camps" -> "the weak" not perishing nearly fast enough -> costs mounting -> extermination. (please note that this train of thought took somewhere between 40-50 years to complete)
E.g. were the "national socialists" the only ones who came to the idea of an "endlosung" ? (no, the soviet socialists did the same thing, many arab "states" like Iraq and Syria did similar things, many so helped by either hitler or the Soviets)
E.g. the volunteer groups : uncomfortable question : "Were some of these groups Jewish ?". Ridiculous thing to ask, right ? Unfortunately the answer will illustrate the blatant ugliness of human nature.
"They didn't know" - perhaps not about the extermination itself, but the rounding up most have been a dead giveaway, right ? So what happened (mostly the removal of these people initially resulted in much less trouble for the rest of the inhabitants. Rouding up cripples/sick/... resulted in less cost for hitler's "national healthcare")
The above post makes it seem as if the decision for rounding up Jews (and gypsies, and cripples, and...) and exterminating them was one single decision. It wasn't. They were in fact nearly 3 years separated. So what triggered the first (the "eugenics" component of the socialist ideology, which came out of darwinism) and what triggered the second (darwinism's predictions not matching reality : when isolated the "weak" (ie. the Jews) did not perish... this resulted both in costs which the government could not support and in the uncomfortable question "what if the Jews aren't 'the weak' ?")
Given that hitler "hated Jews", how come so many sick and cripple native germans were rounded up ?
What were the "innovations" that hitler courted the German vote with ? (he had a majority before he became dictator by falsifying attacks) You really don't want to know the answer to this one.
Actually last time the earth warmed (after the middle ages and the defeat of muslims in spain when the colonization of greenland started), it scarcely took 10 years. Plenty of soil pockets left in Greenland and Siberia. Of course it warmed only to start cooling again (and when that cooling, known as the "mauder minimum", stopped and reversed global warming started. Temperatures have been steadily increasing ever since). When the global warming streak stopped an entire country, Greenland, died out to the last man. Literally.
Greenland was scarcely the only country to die out due to global cooling, but it was the only western one, the only one we have something of an account of the decline and death of the cities.
But in Siberia, in fact, there are still humans living there that still till a few fields. Greenland has productive, if slightly confused neighbors. Especially Siberia will repopulate very very quickly indeed. And not with brown people.
Plants, bacteria and the other stuff in "soil" doesn't have to cross the distances, it's already there. Even humans don't.
Perhaps you should read Jared Diamond's book. It's not all that scientific (though more so than most websites on the subject), but it'll certainly make you think.
If we don't the whole business of natural reserves, "unharmed forest", environmental protection is...
kinda stupid.
After all, we are not capable of making those preserves safe for the animals that live there, so we can't ensure their survival, protect them from invaders,... We can't even ensure the survival of the animals we like in the midst of the most advanced nation on the planet. Yellowstone park has, despite many attempts to reverse the damage, lost many of the species it was meant to protect.
That would mean the whole business of environmental protection, at best, serves to create a nice view for the super-rich who can afford a villa in there anyway. To temporarily create enough game for them to shoot. And nothing more.
Which, of course, is the truth, but you'll never hear al gore say it.
Ask Cory Doctorow. Apparently you just need to use a creative commons license. That will stimulate his ego, oh wait, I mean help you.
And, let's face it, if stimulating someone's ego is not the primary economic activity in America, then we really chose the wrong president.
"Founding editor of Boing Boing Cory Doctorow has written a report about 'do-it-yourself' digital licensing, which he's touting as the panacea for piracy. Doctorow's solution for content creators is two-fold: Get a Creative Commons license, and append some basic text requiring those who re-use your work to pay you a percentage of their gross income. Doctorow refers to this as the middle ground between simply acquiring a Creative Commons license and hiring expensive lawyers for negotiations. He calls do-it yourself licensing 'cheap and easy licensing that would turn yesterday's pirates into tomorrow's partners."
Neither, it's called "science based policy" which is an anathema to the neocons and religious right, Greenpeace just happens to be aligned with the scientific evidence on AGW, GE are much better aligned with the evidence when it comes to nuclear power.
You could never have a science based policy without scientifically proven theories.
You know what scientifically proven means ? That they made predictions that worked out. "Predicting" past events doesn't count, no matter how precise (due to overfitting problems), otherwise the late trains in New York city metro lines would be considered an accurate predictor of the number of sunspots, after all they had a correlation of nearly 0.95 for 2 years. Of course the month after this was published they diverged. But even if it takes longer to diverge...
Now obviously any theory that purports to predict events 50 or 100 years from now (or 1000 years from now) cannot be proven in less than at least twice the prediction interval (in order to have at least a bit of confidence). The soonest any actually scientific climate theory could be considered proven is therefore around 2150.
In reality the climate models STILL have not accurately predicted weather or temperature changes 2 months out, a fact you won't find all that often in popular media. They were not just off the mark, but they were more wrong than the error margin for 2006, 2007 AND 2008 (that means that the IPCC's theories predicted that the chance of the weather that actually occured in those 3 years was less than 2%. So the chance that the theories that the IPCC used in 2005 was correct is 2%^3 or 0.0008%.
Note that those theories were accepted as the literal truth in numerous climate policies.
So as I'm sure you seeing this coming right now. If we truly had "science based policy" all those agreements based on flat out wrong models would have been undone.
In fact, since the creation on the IPCC itself was based on scientific theories that also proved wrong, science based policy would mean that decision would have been reversed itself.
So let's not kid ourselves : climate change "theories" are little more than extending the weather patterns of the last 100 years into the future. The deviation between drawing a line from the average temperature in 1900, pass through the average temperature in 2000 and extrapolate to 2100 only deviates a single percentage point from the "latest and greatest" IPCC model (the 2 degrees one).
So let's not kid ourselves. It does NOT matter how many people are convinced, reality just doesn't care. Everybody believed the titanic couldn't sink, opinions are worthless. Until you can accurately predict you should SHUT UP about theories.
Our sun (and especially we ourselves) formed out of supernova remains. So yes "our" sun never went supernova. However where it formed there used to be "another" sun in roughly the same location that was also a yellow dwarf star.
And that one was preceded by yet another yellow dwarf star that went nova probably some 9 billion years ago. But that was the first one in "our little corner of the galaxy".
Our sun is a "third generation" star. It contains a lot of particles from both first and second generation sun. As do we, obviously.
If you reverse the words "halliburton" and "greenpeace" your statements are right :
-> obviously greenpeace is "progressive", not halliburton (which is a name a certain party likes to call itself to disguise it's extreme regressive nature : the desire to put people back in the "more natural" stone age) -> greenpeace is not merely "opposing the majority", it is lobbying, threatening and committing crimes in the name of a tiny majority that they misinform on purpose (e.g. about nuclear power and it's "dangers"). As we all know they are not even careful about lying, flat out contradicting even themselves and they are not careful about committing criminal acts "in their cause" either -> greenpeace coopts entire governments, or at least, much more so than halliburton. If you're lamenting the fact that middle eastern governments don't listen to their people, "leaving them with no recourse", well that's not halliburton's fault (currently it's mainly a certain "prophet" whose at fault). Have you read some of the EU's or Obama's proposals ? Tell me who was the inspiration : halliburton or greenpeace ? It's quite obvious from where I'm sitting.
Yes, however last time I checked that generated about 0.2 watts, which is beyond pitiful. You certainly need 200W to get a signal to earth, and probably more.
The problem is that the "waste" isotopes are too long-lived. It's not that they don't have energy, or that they don't radiate it out, but it takes too long (much like unenriched uranium : that's already been in the ground for about 3 billion years* and still not used).
* yes I know that's older than the earth is. That's because those isotopes were created the last time the sun went nova (or even 7 billion years old, the next-to-last time the sun went nova). They first existed in instellar cloud, then asteroid "ground", and finally earth ground.
You can have your cake and eat it too: regulate the economy in such a way that your sense of "justice" is reflected there. In other words, tax things like carbon emissions, since your goal is to eliminate them. Let the economy do the work of figuring out how to get rid of carbon emissions. Suddenly, polluting companies have a profit motive to be clean.
Clean ? Great ! You will advance this lofty goal by limiting a single substance...
Let's be fair : we don't even know the influence co2 has on the environment. Not really, I mean. If I change the athmosphere at my place and increase co2 content of the athmosphere a millionfold, there isn't a scientist on this planet that can tell me how this will influence tomorrow's weather.
Add to that the jurisdiction problem : the polluting companies have a profit motive to move where greenpeace can't touch them, like China. Or Africa. They do not have a real motive to change their ways, except for industries that, for the moment, cannot be imported or exported, like power generation. It is a matter of time till that changes.
And then there is the long term predictions evolution makes. It is no use whatsoever protecting any species. The weak perish, and the strong survive. The strong are those that adapt to pollution, the weak are those that don't. If you actually believe in evolution, this is exactly the way it should be (and we don't have the power to change any of it anyway).
The difference between halliburton and greenpeace is that Halliburton pursues it's own self-intrest by offering others more choices.
They create products, and they give people the option of buying them. They increase the options available to many people. Halliburton's customers include states, armies, corporations and individuals.
All these customers of Halliburton have, at any time, the option of cutting their ties with Halliburton. Halliburton cooperates with people, to mutual benefit (their profit in whatever form agreed AND the customer's profit in the form of the use of Halliburton's products and services).
Greenpeace is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a company that works by offering people choices.
What greenpeace does is ask people to join it and pay it, so that they may use that money and influence to force others to do certain things.
So what is greenpeace selling ? Power. You pay greenpeace (or any other similar lobbyist organisation) and they (attempt to) force others to comply with your ideals. They do not ask, they do not even negotiate (certainly not with those whose behavior they want to change). They only consider force : the force of law. Or in the case of greenpeace : through law, through sabotage, port blockages, even straight attacks on companies, through... (they have actually fired at a ship, so they go quite far actually)
Greenpeace is selling the use of military force to advance someone's will, outside of the normal democratic process. That's how greenpeace pursues it's self intrest.
Slashdot Mirror
How exactly does falsifying a quote (just check it) prove anything ?
Because the "moderates" view the actual content of the bible as not important.
Just like postmodernists view the actual relation between science and reality as subject to change, and irrelevant. Needless to say, science is supposed to be an approximate model of reality, getting closer to reality all the time. It is most certainly not independant of reality.
Both positions are disastrously misguided. In reality both groups are the same, the "moderates" will betray their religion the first time it seems like a good idea and postmodernists enact policies they can perfectly well predict will backfire. They have no ideology at all. Right now their "ideas of the second" seem invincible, but you just wait 5 years and they'll be forgotten. The global warming craze, was ironically preceede by a global cooling craze and will make way for the next idiocy once unmasked for the idiocy that it is. Just like the latest pushes for extreme accomodation of enemies will give way once they get blown up. They are mere fashions, posing as science or religion, nothing more.
E.g. Obama's national healthcare. Exactly how many times must this be implemented and disastrously go wrong before we learn ? A basic respect of science would make them at least explain, honestly, exactly how their scheme differs from that in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and the many European states where it's collapsing. But they don't even attempt to show the difference.
Another example. The IPCC was founded on the prediction that 2008 would be the warmest year on record. In reality it's was close to the coldest year on record. A real scientist would go back to the drawing board, figure out what went wrong (because we don't even know why 2008 and the years before it were so cold, we haven't got a clue. Perhaps the solar cycle had something to do with 2008, but that leaves 2006 and 2007 unexplained ... apparently "something" caused an ocean oscillation is the current theory. Well I sure hope that this unknown "something" factor that apparently regularly causes sea changes in global temperatures are modeled correctly. How do you model large unknowns ? You don't). Before that, they declared la nina, a wind of south america, for their previous disastrous misprediction.
The fact that you don't immediately see what is wrong with that sentence is indicative of just how wrong current opinion on the subject is : if models don't match reality, the blame rests, not on reality such as winds or ocean oscillations, but with the scientists makin gthe prediction
Government for the dollar, by the dollar.
The only change is doing it in public. But seriously, this government is going to send a $300.000 bill to every newborn American already, isn't it getting "a bit" ridiculous ?
At what point do you impeach a president ? When he spends $1 million of your money ? In other words, next month ?
So many mistakes ... so little space to illustrate them
(On a side note, if you take the Bible to be completely without error, this means that any discrepancy whatsoever topples it totally;
If you were a 100% perfect human, yes. However the bible clearly states that any human is merely a little fallible being, much less reliable than the text of the bible (which seems to me an evident truth, even if the bible were not to be all that accurate, beating human's reliability isn't hard at all).
One example of this is the values of pi that can be found in the bible. You can find different values for that constant. Of course, upon closer inspection this turns out to be untrue : pi is said to be "about 3", and yet it is said "you should relate a circumference to it's radius like 22/7" (which is a very good and simple to use approximation. I know architects used it right up to 2001 : it calculates heavenly, yet is accurate enough for quite large structures).
Clearly things like that have bearing on the correct way to read the bible.
how do you justify the discrepancies between the accounts of Judas's death in Matthew 27:3-10 and Acts 1:18?
So, obviously, the answer is that further study is required, as the flaw is obviously in our reading comprehension and not in the bible. Just like the contradictions in science (e.g. we know the universe to be bigger than 26 billion light years and no older than 13 billion light years. So either faster-than-light travel is possible (and quite likely, if a few billion galaxies have done it), or the big bang theory is wrong. But that's just one, there are many others. Contradictions are how science advances. Contradictions are how theology advances).
Apparent contradictions demand further study, not a rejection of everything we know. After all, we know that the theory of natural numbers has a contradiction related to infinite collections (does the collection of all collections that don't containt themselves contained in itself ? The answer is both yes and no). All theory in exact sciences is utterly dependent on the theory of natural numbers (since rational and real numbers are constructed out of this collection).
So if you were to reject everything that contained a contradiction, rather than realizing it's imperfection, you would in fact have to drop all of science.
You see, to a believer, contradictions in the bible are like scientific contradictions. There is no shortage of either. They are further similar, they merely mean that there are (hopefully small) imperfections in both our understanding of the bible and our understanding of the universe, even in our understanding of basic mathematics there are known contradictions.
We know Newton to be "wrong". Yet everything we do, putting down buildings and structures, is in fact done disregarding the differences between Newton and Einstein. Therefore you should conclude that our past understanding does not lose it's applicability to everyday problems just because it's shown to be slightly inaccurate. Just like one apparent problem in reading the bible does not mean everything is inaccurate.
One can be strong like steel, which is able to flex and give and thus remain intact, or strong like carbon fiber, which despite its greater nominal strength cracks or shatters when forced to move; "religious moderates" are those who take the former path, and whose core beliefs are thus able to survive and persist in a changing world).
This is the absurdity of the "lucas argument". It is utterly dependant on the consistency of human thought.
A consistency that is non-existent. Just look at the democrats who blame bush for "the biggest deficit in history". Say, how much did Obama spend in his first single month, again ? Of course, THAT spending has nothing to do with our debt.
But that's just one example many people are frustrated about. Unfortunately it can be trivially shown t
See, this is exactly what I mean. "NOOO the nazis (national socialists) were right-wing. They are the republicans. And we just can't discuss it".
The fact is that the nazis were more "modern" socialists than the soviets. They did not have faith in the automatic nature of the socialist revolution and needed to cause it themselves.
There are many, many uncomfortable truths about socialists. They were racist for the largest part of the 20th century. The KKK was, for over 50 years, a department of the democratic party, which was nearly exclusively a defender of, shall we say, the "southern way of life". A salient detail : Al Gore was secretary of his father, when his father was fighting to repeal the equality of black people.
And of course lefty propaganda is totally free of scaremongering and propaganda. Say ... what's this whole "anti-racism" thing, and this "global warming" stuff, that just doesn't exist right ?
(oh right, like socialist eugenics before them, those are "scientific"* facts**)
* or whatever word makes it sound more serious. Liberals don't care about the contents of words, just the effect they have. Scientific, for example, would imply that there's a model of global warming that made predictions that ACTUALLY HAPPENED. As opposed to the totally unforeseen massive cold streak that's been with us for 3 years and counting, which would invalidate all those models if the rules of real science were followed and send all the alarmists back to the drawing board.
Scientific would imply that, if someone from the GOP said it.
** the real uncomfortable truth is that socialist eugenics were based on actual scientific studies, the sad truth is that according just about any scientific study blacks and whites are, in fact, different. White people are weaker and slower, white women cannot, on average, match the number of children a black woman can give birth to, and, unfortunately, black people are, again on average, dumber, just like whites are dumber than yellow people. This are statistical truths. They do not mean that every white is weaker than every black, nor that every black is dumber than every white. These are just a few examples, there are so many differences. AIDS immunity, for example, is a few thousand times more prevalent in blacks than in whites (some 10-15% of blacks are immune). In case anyone hadn't noticed yet, blacks have bigger lips and a more pronounced mouth.
There are other "rules" about muslims : such as the fact that they cannot live anywhere except in the caliph's nation.
They are to emigrate immediately. Seen any muslim do so lately ?
So let's stop the "oh no here's a tiny inpractical detail" bullshit. 9/11, constant attacks everywhere just didn't happen in the liberal mind. They mean nothing.
Except of course, if you were in the towers, or on the subway, or on the bus, or just minding your own business in the many places where muslims are massacring.
ur question uncomfortable in the least -- as modern interpretations of Islam (as opposed to those promoted by extremists) do not lead to a fully integrated war effort, and indeed, we do not see such efforts in practice . If the civilian population of Iraq were fully aligned against us, for instance, there would
No, there are merely extermination squads and such more. I mean you can deny stuff, "no agression in sight", like a total baboon all you want, but no Egyptian copt will believe you. No Jordanian Jew will believe you, not a single Christian Somali will agree with you.
In fact not even sufi's in Algeria, who share 99% of their ideology with "mainstram" islam (you call this "those promoted by extremists"), will believe that there isn't an integrated war effort to exterminate them.
Your "tolerance and compassion" has a long history, and is aptly described by this poem. And yet you pretend it is *so* much nobler than that, and don't talk about how the actions inspired by your "liberalism" are *exactly* the same as those cowardice would inspire. That, of course, is a mere coincidence that cannot be discussed.
Btw, I wonder. The prophet muhammad killed over 12000 people. Some because they were Jews, some because they were "infidels", some because they had stuff he wanted to steal. He also fucked a 9 year old girl against her will (she was sold to him in trade for a position in his army). These are the things muslims believe, including of course the motivations of this massacring prophet, and as they are written down very clearly for hundreds of years, are not open for discussion.
Tell me, would such behavior be considered extremist by you ? And then ask yourself the simple question : is the behavior of this guy ... what exactly is the core of islam ? How is a muslim supposed to behave according to islam ?
How do you define "moderate" islam ? I wonder since requiring any measure of moderation would exclude the very core of the islamic ideology as an extremist nutbag.
Would you require a moderate muslim not to kill in the name of religion ? That would exclude mohamed. Would you require a moderate muslim not to commit paedophilic rape ? That would exclude mohamed. Would you require a moderate muslim not to steal or fight "in the name of allah" ? That would exclude mohamed.
How exactly will you explain this to muslims (until quite recently known as mohameddans) ?
The liberal mind and the fight for the bubble isolating them from reality.
Btw : how do you defend yourself being "liberal", a word which means freedom ? After all you're defending a totalitarian ideology that's killing off dissenters. You really can't get any more illiberal than that.
On the other hand, were it done right it would make for a very interesting game (the grey area I mean, the torture bit wouldn't add anything).
However I'm afraid it would be extremely difficult to pull off successfully. Few films managed it and with games where the player has to feel at least a degree of freedom it would probably be even more difficult.
This assumes, of course, that once Germany turned into the street of "national socialism" and started the associated programs (national health care, free universities, massive unemployment and retirement benefit packages) that they had any real choice left ...
It could be interesting to start a player out at the head of such a government, and said player has to balance the different aspects. Ie. said player would have to avoid getting lynched because the government fails to hold up the benefit packages and a player has to choose for himself whether to enact various nazi policies, and has to contend with the stifling and debilitating effect government control has on companies and production. And has to content with all sorts of effects. E.g. free press -> exposure to soviet and american propaganda -> regular lefty terrorist actions and american propaganda turning people against the fascist ideology.
You could make it really fun. Start it in 2008 century and call it "B.O."
We would not have been required to fight in a manner to preserve Japanese civilians in such a ground war. (The complete social integration of the Jap war effort argues that distinction between civilian and uniformed fighter was pointless anyway.)
You mean that, given a totalitarian ideology exists in a certain country, that there is no real distinction between actual armed forces and "innocents" ?
As illustrated here this was true for both Nazi germany *and* "imperial" Japan ("imperial" being a name that disguises a religion, an ideology, and not a state)
Talk about an uncomfortable truth. And then the real shocker : "say, how does this apply to islam ?". Boy, I wouldn't want to expose a "liberal" mind to that one.
Which generates yet another uncomfortable question : what is the difference between those peoples (Europe in the mid-twentieth century and Japan) and today's middle east ?
Or : if you want a people to peacefully rebuild, what is the influence of showing that you're willing and able to exterminate them if they don't (with firebombing random civilians / nuking a city). Was that really a negative influence ?
Realist thinking leads to very uncomfortable questions indeed. It promotes the danger of seeing that the nazis did not start out exterminating people, but started with the idea of equalizing german society. It makes people dangerously prone of seeing the connections that are evident, connections that we are deeply uncomfortable with, like socialism + darwinism -> healthcare cost mounting + "the weak will perish anyway" -> socialist "eugenics" -> isolating "the weak that will perish in camps" -> "the weak" not perishing nearly fast enough -> costs mounting -> extermination. (please note that this train of thought took somewhere between 40-50 years to complete)
E.g. were the "national socialists" the only ones who came to the idea of an "endlosung" ? (no, the soviet socialists did the same thing, many arab "states" like Iraq and Syria did similar things, many so helped by either hitler or the Soviets)
E.g. the volunteer groups : uncomfortable question : "Were some of these groups Jewish ?". Ridiculous thing to ask, right ? Unfortunately the answer will illustrate the blatant ugliness of human nature.
"They didn't know" - perhaps not about the extermination itself, but the rounding up most have been a dead giveaway, right ? So what happened (mostly the removal of these people initially resulted in much less trouble for the rest of the inhabitants. Rouding up cripples/sick/... resulted in less cost for hitler's "national healthcare")
The above post makes it seem as if the decision for rounding up Jews (and gypsies, and cripples, and ...) and exterminating them was one single decision. It wasn't. They were in fact nearly 3 years separated. So what triggered the first (the "eugenics" component of the socialist ideology, which came out of darwinism) and what triggered the second (darwinism's predictions not matching reality : when isolated the "weak" (ie. the Jews) did not perish ... this resulted both in costs which the government could not support and in the uncomfortable question "what if the Jews aren't 'the weak' ?")
Given that hitler "hated Jews", how come so many sick and cripple native germans were rounded up ?
What were the "innovations" that hitler courted the German vote with ? (he had a majority before he became dictator by falsifying attacks) You really don't want to know the answer to this one.
the fact that most computers in africa can't even run most proprietary software ? Let alone windows vista.
Although importing new netbooks is only a tiny little bit more expensive than sending used computers there.
Actually last time the earth warmed (after the middle ages and the defeat of muslims in spain when the colonization of greenland started), it scarcely took 10 years. Plenty of soil pockets left in Greenland and Siberia. Of course it warmed only to start cooling again (and when that cooling, known as the "mauder minimum", stopped and reversed global warming started. Temperatures have been steadily increasing ever since). When the global warming streak stopped an entire country, Greenland, died out to the last man. Literally.
Greenland was scarcely the only country to die out due to global cooling, but it was the only western one, the only one we have something of an account of the decline and death of the cities.
But in Siberia, in fact, there are still humans living there that still till a few fields. Greenland has productive, if slightly confused neighbors. Especially Siberia will repopulate very very quickly indeed. And not with brown people.
Plants, bacteria and the other stuff in "soil" doesn't have to cross the distances, it's already there. Even humans don't.
Perhaps you should read Jared Diamond's book. It's not all that scientific (though more so than most websites on the subject), but it'll certainly make you think.
If we don't the whole business of natural reserves, "unharmed forest", environmental protection is ...
kinda stupid.
After all, we are not capable of making those preserves safe for the animals that live there, so we can't ensure their survival, protect them from invaders, ... We can't even ensure the survival of the animals we like in the midst of the most advanced nation on the planet. Yellowstone park has, despite many attempts to reverse the damage, lost many of the species it was meant to protect.
That would mean the whole business of environmental protection, at best, serves to create a nice view for the super-rich who can afford a villa in there anyway. To temporarily create enough game for them to shoot. And nothing more.
Which, of course, is the truth, but you'll never hear al gore say it.
Ask Cory Doctorow. Apparently you just need to use a creative commons license. That will stimulate his ego, oh wait, I mean help you.
And, let's face it, if stimulating someone's ego is not the primary economic activity in America, then we really chose the wrong president.
"Founding editor of Boing Boing Cory Doctorow has written a report about 'do-it-yourself' digital licensing, which he's touting as the panacea for piracy. Doctorow's solution for content creators is two-fold: Get a Creative Commons license, and append some basic text requiring those who re-use your work to pay you a percentage of their gross income. Doctorow refers to this as the middle ground between simply acquiring a Creative Commons license and hiring expensive lawyers for negotiations. He calls do-it yourself licensing 'cheap and easy licensing that would turn yesterday's pirates into tomorrow's partners."
even legitimate small companies aren't all that honest when it comes to reporting profits.
Thinking about it, I know a few small companies, quite legitimate, that don't even bother calculating profits on individual products.
I wonder if slashdot has paid Cory Doctorow for this specific part of his writing ...
After all, if a corporation like slashdot can't be bothered to comply with his licensing idea ... then who can ?
Neither, it's called "science based policy" which is an anathema to the neocons and religious right, Greenpeace just happens to be aligned with the scientific evidence on AGW, GE are much better aligned with the evidence when it comes to nuclear power.
Are you truly that naive/dumb ?. What would happen to a "science based policy" if the science turned out massively wrong ?
You could never have a science based policy without scientifically proven theories.
You know what scientifically proven means ? That they made predictions that worked out. "Predicting" past events doesn't count, no matter how precise (due to overfitting problems), otherwise the late trains in New York city metro lines would be considered an accurate predictor of the number of sunspots, after all they had a correlation of nearly 0.95 for 2 years. Of course the month after this was published they diverged. But even if it takes longer to diverge ...
Now obviously any theory that purports to predict events 50 or 100 years from now (or 1000 years from now) cannot be proven in less than at least twice the prediction interval (in order to have at least a bit of confidence). The soonest any actually scientific climate theory could be considered proven is therefore around 2150.
In reality the climate models STILL have not accurately predicted weather or temperature changes 2 months out, a fact you won't find all that often in popular media. They were not just off the mark, but they were more wrong than the error margin for 2006, 2007 AND 2008 (that means that the IPCC's theories predicted that the chance of the weather that actually occured in those 3 years was less than 2%. So the chance that the theories that the IPCC used in 2005 was correct is 2%^3 or 0.0008%.
Note that those theories were accepted as the literal truth in numerous climate policies.
So as I'm sure you seeing this coming right now. If we truly had "science based policy" all those agreements based on flat out wrong models would have been undone.
In fact, since the creation on the IPCC itself was based on scientific theories that also proved wrong, science based policy would mean that decision would have been reversed itself.
So let's not kid ourselves : climate change "theories" are little more than extending the weather patterns of the last 100 years into the future. The deviation between drawing a line from the average temperature in 1900, pass through the average temperature in 2000 and extrapolate to 2100 only deviates a single percentage point from the "latest and greatest" IPCC model (the 2 degrees one).
So let's not kid ourselves. It does NOT matter how many people are convinced, reality just doesn't care. Everybody believed the titanic couldn't sink, opinions are worthless. Until you can accurately predict you should SHUT UP about theories.
Our sun (and especially we ourselves) formed out of supernova remains. So yes "our" sun never went supernova. However where it formed there used to be "another" sun in roughly the same location that was also a yellow dwarf star.
And that one was preceded by yet another yellow dwarf star that went nova probably some 9 billion years ago. But that was the first one in "our little corner of the galaxy".
Our sun is a "third generation" star. It contains a lot of particles from both first and second generation sun. As do we, obviously.
If you reverse the words "halliburton" and "greenpeace" your statements are right :
-> obviously greenpeace is "progressive", not halliburton (which is a name a certain party likes to call itself to disguise it's extreme regressive nature : the desire to put people back in the "more natural" stone age)
-> greenpeace is not merely "opposing the majority", it is lobbying, threatening and committing crimes in the name of a tiny majority that they misinform on purpose (e.g. about nuclear power and it's "dangers"). As we all know they are not even careful about lying, flat out contradicting even themselves and they are not careful about committing criminal acts "in their cause" either
-> greenpeace coopts entire governments, or at least, much more so than halliburton. If you're lamenting the fact that middle eastern governments don't listen to their people, "leaving them with no recourse", well that's not halliburton's fault (currently it's mainly a certain "prophet" whose at fault). Have you read some of the EU's or Obama's proposals ? Tell me who was the inspiration : halliburton or greenpeace ? It's quite obvious from where I'm sitting.
700 billion handout to banks to put them under control of the government you mean. Obama's simply not happy merely controlling the government.
I wonder what he'll buy next year ... and how much it'll cost us.
Yes, however last time I checked that generated about 0.2 watts, which is beyond pitiful. You certainly need 200W to get a signal to earth, and probably more.
The problem is that the "waste" isotopes are too long-lived. It's not that they don't have energy, or that they don't radiate it out, but it takes too long (much like unenriched uranium : that's already been in the ground for about 3 billion years* and still not used).
* yes I know that's older than the earth is. That's because those isotopes were created the last time the sun went nova (or even 7 billion years old, the next-to-last time the sun went nova). They first existed in instellar cloud, then asteroid "ground", and finally earth ground.
Somehow I think it will be considered less-than-communist.
You can have your cake and eat it too: regulate the economy in such a way that your sense of "justice" is reflected there. In other words, tax things like carbon emissions, since your goal is to eliminate them. Let the economy do the work of figuring out how to get rid of carbon emissions. Suddenly, polluting companies have a profit motive to be clean.
Clean ? Great ! You will advance this lofty goal by limiting a single substance ...
Let's be fair : we don't even know the influence co2 has on the environment. Not really, I mean. If I change the athmosphere at my place and increase co2 content of the athmosphere a millionfold, there isn't a scientist on this planet that can tell me how this will influence tomorrow's weather.
Add to that the jurisdiction problem : the polluting companies have a profit motive to move where greenpeace can't touch them, like China. Or Africa. They do not have a real motive to change their ways, except for industries that, for the moment, cannot be imported or exported, like power generation. It is a matter of time till that changes.
And then there is the long term predictions evolution makes. It is no use whatsoever protecting any species. The weak perish, and the strong survive. The strong are those that adapt to pollution, the weak are those that don't. If you actually believe in evolution, this is exactly the way it should be (and we don't have the power to change any of it anyway).
The difference between halliburton and greenpeace is that Halliburton pursues it's own self-intrest by offering others more choices.
They create products, and they give people the option of buying them. They increase the options available to many people. Halliburton's customers include states, armies, corporations and individuals.
All these customers of Halliburton have, at any time, the option of cutting their ties with Halliburton. Halliburton cooperates with people, to mutual benefit (their profit in whatever form agreed AND the customer's profit in the form of the use of Halliburton's products and services).
Greenpeace is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a company that works by offering people choices.
What greenpeace does is ask people to join it and pay it, so that they may use that money and influence to force others to do certain things.
So what is greenpeace selling ? Power. You pay greenpeace (or any other similar lobbyist organisation) and they (attempt to) force others to comply with your ideals. They do not ask, they do not even negotiate (certainly not with those whose behavior they want to change). They only consider force : the force of law. Or in the case of greenpeace : through law, through sabotage, port blockages, even straight attacks on companies, through ... (they have actually fired at a ship, so they go quite far actually)
Greenpeace is selling the use of military force to advance someone's will, outside of the normal democratic process. That's how greenpeace pursues it's self intrest.